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In India, the Golden Age of Television Is Now

GHANSHYAM P. SHAH, an 82-year-old widower, spends up to eight hours a day in front of his television watching prayer services, soap operas and financial news. But one afternoon last December, he was completely disconnected from his favorite pastime — and visibly unsettled — because his new digital set-top box was not working.

“I’ll become really agitated if I can’t watch,” Mr. Shah said as Rumy M. Bhagat, the owner of a small cable company, gave up and plugged the wire directly into the television until he could return with another box. The image was no longer digital, but that did not matter to Mr. Shah, a retired gold and silver dealer, whose face lit up as CNBC India reported that the price of gold was up in afternoon trading.

Mr. Bhagat explained that some set-top boxes, which had been sitting in warehouses for months in advance of a government-mandated change to digital television, had proved a weak match for the heat and humidity of Mumbai. “Sometimes we have teething problems,” he said.

Growing pains like these are common throughout India’s booming television industry. Deregulation and new technology have combined to produce an explosion of new offerings. Before the early 1990s, a single government broadcaster provided a handful of channels. Now a crowded field of domestic and global media companies, including the News Corporation, Sony Entertainment and Walt Disney, offer hundreds of channels.

Indian films, especially the flashy musicals and dramas of Bollywood, have grabbed plenty of attention in the West. But the country’s lesser-known television business is more than twice as big, with an estimated $3.4 billion in revenue in 2005, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. It is also starting to exert greater cultural influence.

Television ownership is growing fast here, and it has plenty more room to expand. There are roughly 105 million homes with televisions in India, up from 88 million in 2000. The current number of television households is about the same as in the United States, though for India that amounts to only about half of the country’s households, compared with 98 percent in the United States.

Advertising spending on Indian television increased by 21 percent a year, on average, from 1995 to 2005, when it reached $1.6 billion, according to ZenithOptimedia, which tracks advertising globally. Double-digit growth rates are expected to continue for years.

Such numbers are very tempting to companies like the News Corporation, Disney, Time Warner and Viacom, which are losing viewers and advertisers in their core Western markets. (In addition to the domestic market, Indian television is also delivered via satellite and cable to the global South Asian diaspora.)

The pace of change in India is supercharged because the country is catching up to, and in some cases leapfrogging, developments that took decades to play out elsewhere.

“Everything that happened in the rest of the world in 10 years, is happening here in two years,” said Vikram Kaushik, the chief executive of Tata Sky, a satellite-TV company that is jointly owned by the News Corporation and the Tata Group, the Indian industrial conglomerate.

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Ghanshyam Shah, 82, watches TV for hours a day. TV ownership and programming are exploding in India.Credit
Santosh Verma for The New York Times

In the 1990s, media companies seized on new opportunities in India after the government, which had controlled broadcasting for nearly 50 years, began releasing its grip. The first big changes in Indian television came in the early part of that decade, when cable operators used satellite dishes, illegal but tolerated at the time, to give subscribers access to news on CNN, as well as American soap operas and movies. Viewers could also watch Indian movies and music on Zee TV, then a fledgling joint venture between the News Corporation and an Indian entrepreneur.

Previously, India’s ruling elite had a dual and somewhat contradictory view of broadcasting. On the one hand, politicians considered it too powerful a force to be left to the private sector, especially in the years after independence in 1947, when the nation’s unity and secularism were considered vulnerable. On the other hand, television was seen as too frivolous to merit much investment at a time when politicians were focused on turning India into an industrial power.

Those attitudes began to change after a financial crisis in the early ’90s forced the Indian government to devalue its currency, the rupee, and to start relinquishing its tight control over the economy. Then, in 1995, the country’s highest court declared the government’s monopoly over broadcasting unconstitutional.

When it did yield, India went further in deregulating television than it did in other sectors of the economy. It also gave up far more control when compared with China, the country against which it is most often measured. Foreign media companies can fully own entertainment networks here; they cannot in China. (India does, however, limit foreign ownership to 26 percent of television news channels and newspapers.)

THE open environment attracted the News Corporation, which entered the market in 1993 by acquiring Star TV. Star has the highest-rated shows among the private networks in Hindi-speaking parts of the country. Sony started its flagship channel here in 1995 and now has seven channels; the company owns about 61 percent of the business, with Indian investors owning the rest. The biggest Indian broadcasters are Zee and Sun TV, which dominates ratings in non-Hindi-speaking southern India.

Still, Doordarshan, the public broadcaster, remains the most widely available network, especially in rural areas, where a majority of the population lives.

To keep up with changing times, Doordarshan has retooled its programming, adding genres like soap operas and musical contests to a lineup that is still dominated by more high-minded — and what some critics would call staid — cultural programming. It has also started a satellite-TV service that has no subscription fees but also does not include the most popular private channels.

Star has been one of the few consistently profitable businesses in Indian television. Although the News Corporation does not disclose financial details of its operations here, Merrill Lynch estimates that Star accounts for 3 percent of the company’s total operating income, or about $116 million in the 2006 fiscal year.

Zee, which started by offering a few hours of programming a day, now has more than two dozen channels; it started a satellite-TV service, DishTV, in 2004. “We offered an alternative to a broadcaster, Doordarshan, from which urban audiences felt disconnected,” said Ashish Kaul, a senior vice president at Zee. “You cannot blame Doordarshan; it had a national obligation.”

About 60 percent of the nation’s television households subscribe to the cable or satellite services that carry private channels. Though Indians theoretically have dozens of channels to choose from, a handful dominate the ratings and earn most of the profits. A fragmented cable business is straining to reshape itself in response to new regulations and competition from satellite television services.

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Dhoom Machaoo Dhoom, a Disney show in India, is about four teenage girls who want to start a band.Credit
Santosh Verma for The New York Times

The transition to digital cable, meanwhile, has so far occurred only in parts of India’s four most populous cities. The changeover has been troubled by technical problems, weak enforcement of a Jan. 1 deadline and a shortage of set-top boxes.

At the same time, the newest technology operates alongside the often stark economic and social realities of India. Black-and-white televisions still account for an estimated 40 percent of all TV’s in use, and about 56 percent of rural households do not have electricity, according to India’s 2001 census. And because most homes in India that have a television have just one set, watching TV can be a communal activity that brings together the entire family, and often the neighbors, too.

Perhaps the most striking of the changes in Indian television is what is starting to show up on the screen.

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“Dhoom Machaoo Dhoom” (Hindi for “Let’s have a blast”) is a Disney show aimed at teenagers, and it might look at home on the Disney Channel in the United States. It is about four teenage girls, one of them from New York, who want to start a band so they can represent their school in a talent contest. They face a number of challenges, including an arrogant classmate who is determined to derail their plans.

But the show, which went on the air last month, has an Indian twist. Priyanka, the New Yorker who has returned to her family’s native land, wants the girls to perform a song they have created, rather than using a tune from a popular Bollywood movie, as the local norms dictate. In one episode, Kajal, played by Sriti Jha, complains that Priyanka doesn’t understand India. “Only Bollywood works here,” she insists.

The girls do not dwell on the issue, but it is an important consideration for television executives and media companies here. Indian television has a strong partnership with the film industry, whose stars appear on its shows as guests, contestants and hosts. Movies and music videos from Bollywood remain staples on television here.

Yet in the last decade television has attained influence over the popular culture that is starting to rival that of the film business. And whereas filmmakers have traditionally worked in close-knit networks that operate in a single language, media companies have been exploiting the large and growing capacity of cable and satellite networks to cheaply develop customized channels and shows for different parts of the country. Zee, for instance, operates several regional-language entertainment and news channels.

“We have a vibrant TV industry,” said Rama Bijapurkar, a business consultant whose clients include Disney and who also writes a column for The Economic Times. “When talking about the hinterland, TV is what Bollywood would like to be.”

Nachiket Pantvaidya, an executive director at Disney’s Indian operations, predicted that “Dhoom” would be a breakthrough for Indian television because it was one of the few shows produced for teenagers, and specifically for girls. He said that more than 90 percent of what Indian youths watch on TV are family dramas and other shows created for their parents.

“This is a story of kids who are trying to do something out of the ordinary,” Mr. Pantvaidya said. “Nobody makes TV for the real world. This kind of TV is rare.”

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Ms. Jha, the 20-year-old who plays one of the girls on “Dhoom,” added: “This can’t be compared to the whole lot of family serials. This is much more real and close to the lives of kids.”

“Dhoom” is Disney’s sophomore effort at producing TV shows in India — its first, “Vicky Aur Vetaal,” was based on an Indian myth about a prince and a genie-like figure. The company sees television as the first step in a broader India strategy that includes films, merchandising and possibly a theme park. Last year, Disney spent $44.5 million to acquire a 15 percent stake in UTV, a production company based in Mumbai, and to buy Hungama, a television channel of children’s programming created by UTV.

“We decided early on that this had to be driven locally,” said Gary Marsh, president of entertainment for Disney Channel Worldwide in Burbank, Calif. “If we were to truly become a global company, we had to let our regional organizations create their own programming.” India was the first country where the company developed local Disney Channel shows, something it is now doing in Britain and Japan, too.

Many of Disney’s competitors have built their businesses on a similar strategy. Time Warner, which operates the Pogo and Cartoon Network channels here, is offering an Indian version of “Sesame Street” called “Galli Galli Sim Sim.” The show uses some material from the popular American show, but it is set on an Indian streetscape and is anchored by four local Muppets. A large orange-and-red lion named Boombah replaces Big Bird.

Television executives say the ventures by Disney and others aimed at youths and various niche markets are a welcome break from the way business has been done in India. A handful of channels — which carry soap operas, reality shows, music shows and important cricket tournaments — receive the bulk of the advertising. Yet entrepreneurs continue spending millions of dollars starting copycat networks. India has more than 40 cable news channels, for example.

“Here it is, we have 200 channels of the same stuff, and people are saying let’s do more of it,” said Sameer Nair, chief executive of Star Entertainment, a News Corporation subsidiary. “That will churn and change.” (In an indication that competition is intensifying, Mr. Nair announced last month that he would be leaving Star in March. According to news reports, he will be helping a rival Indian-owned TV company start a new entertainment channel.)

AS media executives try to introduce innovative programming, exactly what can go on the air in India remains fluid. There is no overt censorship of television content, but most media companies say they aggressively police themselves to avoid running afoul of political and cultural mores.

Several movie channels were forced to go off the air for more than a week last summer when a court in Mumbai ruled in favor of a schoolteacher who had argued that films that had been rated for adult viewing only in their cinematic release could not be shown on television without being edited and recertified for a wider audience.

In some ways, television fare in India today is far more adventurous than it was even five years ago. A recent adaptation of “Big Brother,” known here as “Bigg Boss,” for instance, has stirred the pot by showing minor celebrities behaving badly. Though it may seem insignificant, the show has let viewers see famous people as human beings, said Kunal Dasgupta, who heads Sony’s Indian television operations, which broadcasts the show.

Still, Mr. Dasgupta knows that social customs evolve slowly here. He said he was considering “with kid gloves” a proposal from an Italian company to help produce a miniseries that would be based loosely on the life of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of India’s ruling Congress Party who is the widow of the former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi.

The proposal calls for an Indian cast, but the series would take an “Italian perspective,” Mr. Dasgupta said. “I find it very exciting and challenging,” he said. “At the same time, knowing our own media, we could be ripped apart.” He said he was “trying to see if we can get people who are really in power to accept that if we do such a thing it will be O.K.”

The fact that he is even considering such a proposal is a sign of how far television has come in India. And as the country continues to experience major economic and social changes, the shape of Indian television is likely to keep evolving.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: In India, the Golden Age of Television Is Now. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe